Category: Tufts Community News
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Wednesday was a picture-perfect day for promoting sustainability on the Medford campus! President Monaco hosted another picnic on the Medford campus. Faculty, staff, students and new graduates gathered to eat a delicious lunch provided by Tufts catering and enjoyed the beautiful day outside.

To make the picnic a zero-waste event, staff from the Office of Sustainability helped attendees sort recyclable and compostable items at the numerous zero-waste stations located throughout the venue.

Catering also helped with sustainability efforts by providing condiments and drinks in bulk, as opposed to the smaller, individual packages that are commonly seen at such events. This helps reduce packaging waste produced by the event.

In addition to the standard recycling collected at all zero-waste events, plastic film and bags were collected separately to be recycled at Whole Foods!

In order to take our sustainability efforts a step further, we promoted the event as BYOP – Bring Your Own Place-Setting. While using compostable and recyclable items are a great first step to reducing waste, bringing your own place setting from home or work helps reduce waste even more efficiently.

The first 90 attendees who visited the Office of Sustainability’s table had the opportunity to show the plates, knives, forks, and cups they had brought with them to claim a free, reusable sandwich bag as well as an “I saved a Tree” sticker. To our delight and surprise, we ran out of the sandwich bags after just twenty minutes!

Everyone who had a complete place setting was also invited to participate in our raffle to win an insulated, multi-compartmental, bento-style lunchbox. Over 140 people entered our raffle!

We loved seeing the diversity of the place settings people brought with them, and couldn’t be happier with the number of people who enthusiastically stopped by our table.

Head to our Facebook page to see all the photos of everyone who stopped by our table on Wednesday with their place settings.

If you are a faculty, student, or staff at the Boston or Grafton campuses, be sure to bring your own plates, cups, knives, and forks to the President’s lunches next month for a chance to get a reusable sandwich bag and to enter our raffle for the grand prize lunch box! For everyone at Medford, thanks for helping make the event a sustainable one, and we hope to see you next year.

Friday was a busy day at the SMFA, with the last day of review boards, the annual Sidewalk Sale, and the President’s lunch. Every year, the Tufts community celebrates the end of a busy school year at each campus. Tufts Catering provided a delicious picnic lunch, including berries, pound cake, and chocolate sauce for dessert. Anthony Monaco joined staff and students for the zero-waste event, where only recyclable and compostable plates, napkins, utensils, and cups are offered to keep material out of the landfill. Although recycling and composting eliminate waste, reusable options are even better! At this first ever President’s lunch held at SMFA, fifteen people brought their own place settings. Those who arrived with plate, cup, and utensils in hand won a Tufts Sustainability sandwich bag and a chance to win a lunch box. Sporks, Tupperwares, and cloth napkins are convenient to bring to work and school and using them is an easy way to reduce waste. We hope to see everyone at next year’s picnic!

It’s the last day of classes, which means summer is around the corner. It is a time for traveling, whether you’re going home or you’re off to somewhere new. To make your trip more sustainable, be conscious about planning before you leave.

Packing: Bring reusable utensils, tupperware, water bottles, shopping bags. Our sustainable packing video has great tips and tricks to make packing for break easy and sustainable!

Moving Out: The items you do not wish to bring home with you do notnecessarilybelong in the landfill. Donate or recycle clothes, books, plastic bags, electronics and more at our Move Out stations. Find more information on our website.

Leaving: Unplug all electronics, close all windows, turn down the heat, and eat or pack your perishable foods.

Travelling: Take public transportation like busses and trains, carpool, and avoid flying less than 500 miles, and buy a carbon offset if you can.

Move out is around the corner! Packing up everything in your room might seem overwhelming. But Tufts’ Move Out stations, located Uphill and Downhill starting May 5th, make it easy to divert waste from the landfill when you move out of your residence hall. You can even win prizes just for donating!

The UPS Store can help you store or ship anything you will need for next year. They will even have your boxes waiting for you in your room, if you are living on-campus next fall.

This week, you’ll see a lot green, celebrating the earth. Businesses will promote their purported eco-friendly products wrapped in plastic, plastered with pictures of happy trees. Corporate greenwashing, or the practice of dispersing misleading claims about a product; service; or company to create the impression that it is more “environmentally friendly” than it actually is, has infiltrated Earth Day.

However, Earth Day did not begin with an obligatory promotion of trees. After Rachel Carson’s publication of Silent Spring, in 1962, an enormous oil spill in Santa Barbara in 1969, and greater awareness about the links between pollution and the health of living organisms, Senator Gaylord Nelson established the first Earth Day in 1970. Protests rallied “against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife,” according to Earth Day Network’s website.

These issues are relevant, even today, and show that sustainability is important in many parts of the world, not just in exclusive forests. While paying tribute to our trees and natural ecosystems is incredibly important today (and every day), we also need to recognize that our environment is intimately connected to justice and equality. Inevitably, climate change will make the Earth unlivable, especially for communities where people do not have the resources and are not allowed the agency to move away or curtail the effects of global warming. These are the same communities who have contributed the least to causing climate change, disproportionately communities of color and low-income areas. Seeking justice and equality is just as much a part of environmentalism as tree hugging.

Remember, on this Earth Day and every day, that environmental justice, climate justice, the ocean, the trees, the people, and the algae, are all important to protect and are all dependent on each other.